The memristor, or “memory resistor,” was first theorized by Leon Chua at the University of California-Berkeley in 1971[1]. Only theoretical for more than 30 years, researchers at Hewlett-Packard recently announced the discovery of memristors fabricated in their lab [2, 3]. In terms of its behavior, a memristor is a device whose resistance changes under given toggle conditions (e.g., exceeding some voltage) and then holds that resistance until another toggle condition is met. In this way, memristors can, be thought of as reconfigurable resistors with memory. However, given the nature at which Chua arrived at this particular switching property, relating charge (q) and flux linkage (φ), the memristor is a new fundamental electronic device in the same way resistors, capacitors and inductors are fundamental.
Memristors are promising devices for a wide range of potential applications from digital memory, logic and analog circuits, and even some bio-medical applications. Of particular interest for the invention described here memristors can also be applied in the development of neural networks. More specifically, memristor behavior is very similar to that of the synapses found in biological neural networks.